The web has been cleaned with uBlock Origin. Doing that IRL would be great. And for every stupid counter argument (I've seen those on HackerNews), I don't tolerate brain washing.

The most stupid argument I've seen is from an American who said "what if you don't know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?" Well, that's the job of the doctor. Your society has failed if you rely on marketing to eat random chemical dangerous stuff.

It's also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.

Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.

It's a "rich get richer" mechanic that any halfway competent dev would've patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.

The economy should exist to serve real needs of the people. All that advertisement does is create a fake desire for consumption which simply wastes respurces.

I think life would feel more calm, spacious and peaceful.

I'm just going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you can and should donate to your Mastodon and Lemmy instances, even if it's just $5 a month. That's how we band together to keep these platforms ad-free, and I don't know about you all, but I love that my mind isn't being manipulated here.

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.

That'd be great, but the "how" is a much harder question. What counts as advertising? Because there's a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.

Should I be able to say "X product has been great, I recommend it!" Only if I'm not being paid, you say? How could you possibly know?

As discussed in the article, "propaganda" is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal. Propaganda doesn't mean false, it just means it's trying to convince you of something. An advertisement. Heck, the article itself could be considered a form of advertising for legislation.

It's just so trivial of a concept to say, but the moment you spend any amount of time thinking about it, it falls apart. It's like trying to ban the Ship of Theseus from a club.

Took a trip to Cuba, one of the first things I noticed was lack of billboards and advertising in general. It was quite refreshing.

Advertising is pollution

Advertising is illegal in São Paulo. At least, outdoor advertising is illegal.

Look closely -- what don't you see?

Yes yes yes, this!

I always joke w my gf, that when I'm president, I'll ban marketing. It's ugly, wasteful, useless (from the consumer's pov,) annoying, etc. I can't believe it's not hyper-regulated and taxed into oblivion.

Ads should be paying me for using my bandwidth.

Should we allow the best of science to be used to manipulate people's base desires? Or should we protect the average person from being taken advantage of?

Unless you are a sociopath the answer is clear. Advertising in its current form should be completely banned. Perhaps some form of non-comparative advertising could be allowed if it just stated simple facts without creating a psychological hook to subconsciously fuck with the consumer.

Who am I kidding though, give these fuckers even an inch and they will circumnavigate the globe. Ban all advertising.

Advertising is one of the three major incoherent industries along with Insurance and Real Estate.

People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.

Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That's where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.

None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.

Advertising is propaganda, propaganda should be illegal

It won't be though, because it is too powerful to control us

I'm on board and have been for a long time. I am true believer of Bill Hicks' opinion of marketing. I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV in the late 90's because I couldn't stand watching all the propaganda mixed in with the shows. Whenever I'm in a doctor's office lobby or somewhere that has a TV on, it's a bit of a shock to see all the commercial bullshit again.

Does wonders for you once it's not occupying space in your brain.

I personally think physical advertisements in the city should be limited to local businesses only.

And of course, no ads by the motorway, although that’s already the case here in France.

"THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING"

I was on a car from ride sharing app recently, and there was a tablet in front of me playing ads continuously for the whole ride. Asked the driver to turn it off and he said, "I have to keep it on". I know it's not the requirement from the app, so honestly how dystopian is it?

The way things are going people can't afford anything and will have ads blasting in front of them for discounts.

what if we made capitalism illegal? because all of the bullshit like advertising is symptomatic. the root cause is capitalism. western civilization has to be reset entirely. and it will never get done through protesting.

It should be text only, purely factual, and very limited.

“We are blah, selling blah for $x, at $location”

Pretty dumb article if you spend more than a second thinking about this issue.

The entire historical premise that we "didn't have ads" is so fucking incorrect and reeks of appeal to nature. Yeah we didn't have tv ads but we had monarchs and elite that played the same role. How is paying of some sleezy high up salesman is different from a Google search ad? If anything the latter is more ethically apt.

I'd take democracy with ads over whatever the fuck that alternative timeline that polices "unpaid word of mouth"

Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we'd just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There's already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote... Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don't give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they'd "innocently mention" that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald's expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better

I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn't a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.

What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.

Imagine how much labour and money we’d free up to do actually useful things like help homeless people and disabled people etc. If we cut all those marketing and advertising departments.

It’s a whole massive industry that takes massive amounts of financial resources and human labour and doesn’t contribute to anyone’s wellbeing except the stockholders of the company.

Personally I've been of the opinion that advertising, at least in its current form, should be illegal since I was about 15. I'm not 100% sure if it should be completely illegal, or just very heavily regulated. Even after all those years, I'm still baffled nearly every day that people around me seem okay with current advertising.

As someone who had designed and attempted to sell things. On of my key takeaways has always been the lack of awareness or knowledge of my things exists.

Granted if I put a 50ft build board in the sky it wouldn’t change much. But if I did more than I did.. or am doing it would help.

I saw a metaphor in this thread comparing advertising to Smoking. But I think Sugar is a better comparison. Is it needed? No. But a little will go a long way, and some dishes wouldn’t exists without it. Add to much and it ruins the flavour of the dish and isn’t healthy for the consumer.

What is needed is balance and where everything has hyper sugar in it isn’t good for anyone. So I do we need a rethink, but eliminating it outright isn’t the solution.

Another part of the problem I haven't read in the comments is all the companies that rely on advertising to exist, especially media companies. Many newspapers, magazines, websites, TV channels etc would go bankrupt if they couldn't earn money with advertising. There is a simple solution because we can 'just pay them' but I'm afraid we won't. People hate advertising (someone commented "advertising is violence", that really says it all), but still many of us choose to not get the subscription but use the 'free' option instead.

I'm not against banning all advertising, but I think working towards more peaceful advertising might be fruitful. Banning advertising of tabacco products and having disclaimers when financial and medical products show this can be done.

Sao Paolo did this in 2006.

Under the cult of the "Invisible Hand of the Free Market", the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.

Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.

It blew my mind when I read that snacking wasn't a thing until rather recently. In the past, there were three meals a day, if you were lucky.
Nowadays, we all are constantly told by advertising to "take a break" and stuff ourselves. Take a break from what? Sitting in an office chair? Who is really tilling the soil from dawn to dusk anymore? And then they wonder about the worldwide obesity epidemic. A big mystery, indeed.

Oh please gods yes. Advertising is violence and even though most of my life is now ad free, I still can't avoid the advertising scourge being shoved into my eyeballs every time I leave my house. It would be a blessed weight lifted from my already tired brain to never see a single ad again.

“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?